Kicked off this morning in Seattle was Valve's first Steam Dev Days conference where they were pushing their Steam Machines and Linux-based SteamOS agenda, OpenGL/Linux gaming, VR, and other hot topics.

While I am not at their event this week, among the overarching topics widely reported today include:

- Expect many Steam Machines to come in 2014 from many different vendors.

- Valve reportedly has been showing off their own VR solution that is even superior to Oculus Rift.

- The Steam Controller continues to be exciting and they will be opening up the API to their controller but it looks like the controller's touchscreen is being removed. Valve is also relying upon crowd-sourcing the best button layouts, etc.

- The Source 2 Engine has been allegedly referenced many times and from the start it's been designed around Linux and OpenGL. It looks like DirectX will be out the door at Valve!

- Steam has more than 75 million active users.

- Sanitized video recordings of at least some sessions will be available in the weeks ahead.

- Valve is working on a vendor-independent OpenGL debugger called VOGL.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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